It’s Time for Real-Time

The first three I got handled pretty easily. Turns out, I’m totally non-musical, so that guitar thing is going to be tough. But, I’m as excited as Eddie Vedder in a flannel factory about #5.

Sometime around next February (in time for SXSW), you’ll be able to hold in your hands, ponder on your Kindle, show off on your iPad, and maybe even listen on your headphones to a new book from me and my pal Amber Naslund. (Amber is Director of Community for Radian6, co-proprietor of the influential Brass Tack Thinking blog (formerly Altitude Branding), a cool mom, a motivating force, and a hell of a flautist).

We are thrilled to be collaborating, as our thinking around the state of business goes together like Cap’n Crunch cereal and the first half of “Dark Side of the Moon” (trust me). Plus, it’s like the personal trainer scenario. I can’t miss deadlines, because Amber will kill me. We also have an outstanding publisher (Wiley & Sons), and a fortuitously patient, experienced editor (Shannon Vargo) guiding us through the obstacle course.

We Want You!

We desperately want and need your help to keep us on track, too. We’ll be rolling out a Facebook page so that as many folks as possible can begin interacting around the issues covered in the book. We have some other craziness planned, too, and we’ll want to bounce ideas off of you, solicit your genius for marketing the book, and all that stuff.

Your first assignment is to help us settle on a title. We’ve worked on this a lot, and since the book is about 1/3 written (here’s a picture of Amber when all the ideas for the outline have been wrung out of her), we need to lock it down soon. Will you participate in the poll below, and help us figure out what to call it? To aid your decision, here’s what it’s about:

Business is increasingly done in real-time. Customers can be won or lost, every second of every day. But we haven’t yet changed the way we structure and operate our businesses to compensate for this new era of expectations. We reconfigured our companies to accommodate phone. And fax. And FedEx. And Email. But fundamentally, we’ve done very little in response to social media – perhaps the most transformative change of them all.

It’s about the new blueprints that businesses need to reconsider their corporate culture. Who they hire. How they organize and communicate internally. And how they manage crisis and measure success. It’s the book about social media’s impact on the inside of your business, not the outside.

We’re vibrating with excitement about it, and very much are trying to make it a book that applies to everyone. Not just the big companies, but the every companies.

Here are a few options for titles. Would you be so kind as to weigh in, and ask your friends to do so, too? We’d really appreciate it, and look forward to collaborating with you this summer.

One last thing. Sincere thanks to each and every one of you for your support of me and Convince & Convert. There is no way in hell this book happens without this blog, and that’s 100% because of you. I know it. I won’t forget it. And I look forward to buying as many of you a cocktail as possible on publication date. Please stay tuned.